Allen Curnow

Allen Curnow, a poet often published and much admired by the LRB, died in September 2001. Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-97 is available from Carcanet. The Bells of Saint Babel’s has just been published in paperback.

Somebody mistook the day, or how

will we have found ourselves denied

entry, by chained gate, padlocked

bolted door of an empty dark shed

of a hall, miles from the next town-

ship, as many from the last lit lamp?

The night itself unpunctuated,

no Southern Cross, no Pointers, no

cartwheeling, hand- standing giant

Orion, aka Urine (born cauled

in a sacrificial Boeotian cow’s

pelt, pissed...

The typical tidal range, or difference in sea level between high and low tides, in the open ocean is about 2 ft(0.6m), but it is much greater near the coasts.

Desk encyclopedia

Our beach was never so bare. Freak tide, system fault, inhuman error, will it

never stop falling? After dark, said the tables of high water and sunset

pasted on the wall, which don’t deceive. Come on down...

Letter

Reoffending

23 September 1993

In a more or less rapturous review of Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes, Scott Malcomson (LRB, 23 September) credits the celebrated art critic with having written, among other surprising things: ‘Eliot’s rude line about Christ’s “offending feet" springs to mind whenever one looks at such a picture.’ A picture (it could only be) of Christ’s baptism in Jordan,...
Letter

Reoffending

10 June 1993

In a more or less rapturous review of Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes, Scott Malcomson (LRB, 23 September) credits the celebrated art critic with having written, among other surprising things: ‘Eliot’s rude line about Christ’s “offending feet" springs to mind whenever one looks at such a picture.’ A picture (it could only be) of Christ’s baptism in Jordan,...

Turn left at the sign. Lone Kauri Road winds down to the coast. That’s a drop of about five hundred feet. Look out for the waterfall, the wooden bridge, the mown grass, the pohutukawa glade.

The western horizon will have slid behind the mask of an eye-levelled next eyeballing wave. Park here. Proceed on foot. The spot has barbecues with MALE and FEMALE dunnies in a figtree

thicket,...

Hugging the cats

John Bayley, 14 June 1990

Good writing, in prose or verse, can seem a sort of visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good...

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Second Wind

C.K. Stead, 16 February 1989

Much of the best poetry in English at least since the Romantics, is, in a controversial phrase used by Allen Curnow in the introduction to one of his two anthologies of New Zealand poetry,...

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